A while ago, I friended a family friend’s son on Facebook. Nice guy, always pretty quiet, but generally reasonable – at least, that’s how I had known him in the 90s, and I hadn’t really seen him much since. After friending him and his sister, I realized both were Ron Paul supporters. Sure, this could [...]
Posts Tagged ‘cognitive dissonance’
The psychology of leftism
Every now and then you encounter a clear statement of political intent, and today’s comes from a video game site. Their attempt is to describe “We power,” or People Power as we call it here, versus the establishment, which they identify as rightist and individualistic: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual [...]
New Realism
I’d like to present to you today a statement of what I’d call “New Realism.” For those of us who take Plato seriously, and are alert enough to see that we could live at any stage of his civilization cycle, it’s clear that we’re in the declining stage. Furthermore, we can see the evidence all [...]
Nature recycles patterns
Nature reuses patterns. If you see a mathematical distribution, pattern, type of organization or even something you could flowchart in one place, you’ll see it in another: All the bacteria living inside you would fill a half-gallon jug; there are 10 times more bacterial cells in your body than human cells, according to Carolyn Bohach, [...]
Witless crowd empowers its own devils
In a speech at the 1991 Bilderberg Convention, Rockefeller stated “we are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for [...]
Jihad!
The ancients of antiquity put in place foundations for long term, settled society. Unlike today’s abstract rationalism and holistic incoherence, ancient societies recognized a home and best fit for everything at each level of organization. Degree of importance ascended to the highest levels approaching whole system in scope and beyond – that which they believed [...]
Death Metaphor Deconstructed
Following the death of Senator Ted Kennedy earlier in the week, one writer used the event to deconstruct one of the most ludicrous metaphors surrounding death: the idea of “losing a fight with cancer”: The fighting metaphor, especially when applied to cancer, drives me nuts. Cancer is not a war or a football game. It’s [...]
Overproducing food makes life worse
Modern life is a place of illusions, missing information and increasingly miniscule individual roles in society helping to keep our understanding of reality as a whole system at bay. Among these many misperceptions is the Civilizing Effect. Society provides a market, people wander in, money crosses the point of sale, an item magically appears as [...]
Welcome to The Fall
One of the more poignant lyrics of the late 1990s: All of us were taken All that was is gone Of this information Shames us one and all Wheres my compensation? Watching others fall Welcome to the fall Everything is useless Nothing works at all Nothing ever matters Welcome to the fall It reflected a [...]
Open society is a lawless marketplace
Throughout the liberal West, we are taught to adore the Promethean archetype, an uncanny hero who empowers the common people against masters imposing social structure. The ancients offered us the titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, Spartacus, the various prophets and the mythical Robin Hood. Today, we have philanthropists [...]